Atom 1.2

Two weeks ago we released Atom 1.1.0 which was first stable release to pass through the new Atom beta channel. We’d like to keep up the release cadence and get new things into your hands as quickly as we can. Today, we’re proud to announce Atom 1.2 stable and 1.3.0-beta0.

The Big Changes in 1.2.0 Stable

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Upgrade to Electron 0.34.0

Atom 1.2.0 stable is on the latest minor version of Electron which uses Chrome 45 and node 4.1.1. This upgrade was a large jump from 0.30.x included in Atom 1.1.0 which used Chrome 44 and node 3.1.x. The new version of electron brings greater stability and fixes a couple of prettybad, long-standing bugs.

Custom Package Testing Environment

Want to run your package specs with something other than jasmine 1.3? Now you can specify your own test runner. See the PR and the docs for more information.

Fixed crashing when opening files in some cases

Atom was crashing when opening files from git repos with submodules in some cases. The solution was to upgrade git-utils. As of Atom 1.2.0 stable, you should no longer experience this crash.

Tree View speed and API improvements

As of 1.2.0, the tree-view is faster with many files and has an API to specify icons next to files.

Previous to this API, packages like file-icons were using hacks to replace the icons. Check out the API docs for more information.

Available now in Atom 1.3.0-beta0

With another stable release comes another beta. Note that you can always install the beta to get these features right now. Here is a preview of the big things going into 1.3.0.

Startup speed improvements

One of the team focuses has been improving performance, and we’re happy to report that we’ve been making great progress in the startup department. All in, these changes contribute to a 20% - 30% speedup depending on how many packages you have installed. We’ll go into more depth in another post, but if you’re interested, check out the pull requests.

Marker (find and replace!) speed improvements

Along the performance improvement theme, we’ve been focusing on improving the data structures related to markers. Markers are pretty core to Atom—they are the underpinnings for cursors, selections, the autocomplete suggestion box, and find result markers. Making them fast will improve performance for all of these cases, especially when there are tons of markers defined. Similar to the startup improvements, we’ll write an in-depth blog post on the topic.

Upgrade to Electron 0.34.3

Atom 1.3.0-beta0 is on Electron 0.34.3, bringing it up to the latest and greatest version.

Until next time

We’re continuing to crank away at performance and heavily requested features. Atom 1.3 is just around the corner, and along with it will come a new beta with more improvements. Additionally, we’re excited to share in-depth explanations of the performance work and detailed metrics on the improvements.